Yesterday you were watching Frozen and today you are living it out, nithered and watching a snoozy repeat from Southampton and Watford and a dozen other close-fought low thrills games this year in the face of a Baltic blast.

The game at Burnley wasn’t Quality Street. And it wasn’t Celebrations either. It was a toe-numbing box ticking let down, a socks and smellies from an elderly aunt type of a fixture.

Burnley was poor fare. It was scrappy, error-strewn bluster and a flashback to the Championship. And freezing.

And we all knew exactly how it would play out. Boro would pass and pick and probe and labour away to try and get a killer ball into the box, not very often but you hope it is one of those games where it clicks and they plunder a goal.

Burnley would whack it long, mainly hopeful diagonals that would sail over the full back and bounce out of play but occasionally one straight down the throat for a knock on into the box where nine times out of 10 it would be untidily scrambled clear and you pray the other gets spooned over.

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The tense, high-stakes culture clash would obviously be decided by one pivotal play, either a moment of magic or a costly red-faced error. Or a mix and match Christmas combination of the two.

Whack. Long ball forward, flick on, Andre Gray connects with a sweet spot sizzler and in a fraction of a second Victor Valdes goes from hero to zero , first blocking the shot to defend what looked a nailed on nil-nil and then suddenly the ball spins and slithers and squirms out of his fingers and over the line. Game over.

It was a poor game. Most people will have forgotten it before they thaw out. So, somewhere between Blubberhouses and Thirsk then.

But then Boxing Day games so often are poor. They are played out with the same woolly-headed, leaden lack of focus that envelopes the crowd.

You have to go back a long way for fabled 4-2s against Everton and West Ham. They are usually average or below 1-0s, instantly erased from the memory banks.

Even the occasional good results – the 3-0 Riverside win over a dismal Nottingham Forest for instance – are not necessarily good games. That was dull as ditchwater for an hour before finally sparking reluctantly into life.

Which is strange. We may be all slightly sickly after a day and night of excess but the players are all highly trained athletes who treat their bodies as finely tuned machines.

But they are. Last season the weather intervened and much of Lancashire was under water and the game at Blackburn was sensibly called off.

Andre Gray of Burnley and Victor Valdes of Middlesbrough

But you just know that if it had been played it would have been awful. A 1-0 defeat, the winner aqua-planed in off a defenders shins deep into stoppage time.

The deeply disappointing defeat at Burnley had a bitter salt-in-wound sting given the intensity of the rivalry which was so deliberately talked down in the build-up.

And it was worse that Boro were squeezed out in an anaemic encounter that was there for the taking.

And that the entirely predictable route-one-by-numbers goal came after Boro’s best spell of the game. Typical. We’ve seen it all before. Most had already called it.

Burnley was a game where the quality on show was man-marking the thermometer.

As the sun dipped and the temperature plunged so did the entertainment levels and any prospect of avoiding the graveyard shift on Match of the Day.

God it was poor. Both sides huffed and puffed and passes went astray. There were more yellow cards than shots. It felt like there were more yellow cards than moves that didn’t end with a woeful wayward final ball.

Middlesbrough players look dejected after conceding during the Premier League match at Burnley

Even the ‘grudge’ element that could have been the fuel for a feisty fixture coughed and spluttered and rarely threatened to ignite.

There were some signs of needle though. Marten de Roon crunched Ward with an early reducer that had echoes of the way Grant Leadbitter hit Barton like a juggernaut last time here and the home fans were soon

And there were some robust early exchanges between the fans with the 2500 travelling Teessiders in good voice and taking early control of the sonic landscape and agenda.

On the pitch Boro had the edge early on with Negredo almost reaching a good Fabio cross then – although off- side – he swivelled to drill home from an angle so difficult it could have been a maths A level question.

Stuani – this week’s target for the pre-match selection scapegoat flak – put a few efforts wide and then Burnley pumped a couple of harmless free-kicks into the box.

Burnley fans were edgy early on with nervous yelps at their own players and indignant shrieks of condemnation aimed at the referee with almost every decision that went against them – and they thought there were a lot.

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And they threatened to blow with the “seen ‘em given” moment in the Boro box as a ball flicked from close range in a furious scramble clipped Chambers on the arm. That prompted a loud wounded scream of historic injustice.

But as the temperature dropped so did the tempo of the game and the intensity of the atmosphere.

Hands went deep into pockets to only resurface for sarcastic applause at the odd ‘correct’ decision or to flick the Vs at yet another overly fussy booking.

It wasn’t until Burnley scored that the home fans finally found their voices. Up to then all the noise was coming from the Boro fans.

But the goal took the sting out of the travelling Teessiders and confident roaring became notes of frustration and despair before fizzling out into resignation.

We’ve seen this one before. We know how it ends. With toothless flailing. Bloody repeats.